Data General
Data General (DG) was an American company in the computer industry.
Company History
Data General was founded in 1968 by Edson de Castro, who had previously left the Digital Equipment Corporation ( DEC) due to discrepancies. There he was responsible for the famous PDP -8 computer. Since he could not enforce his own ideas at DEC, he left the company to start his own computer company. With a cycle time of 800, later 300 nanoseconds NOVA machines were for years the fastest minicomputer on the market. 1999 Data General was acquired by EMC Corporation.
Marketing
From the start, DG fell on with his aggressive and successful marketing. Famous in the computer industry of the sixties was a poster that showed the founder Ed de Castro big and grainy in black / white. Underneath was something like: " Good day, I'm Ed de Castro We earn our money with computer And because we want to earn a lot of money, we build very good computer. .! ". One of clarity and directness hardly to be surpassed statement. Sales staff of DEC therefore said among customers unusually much about " the bad guys from Data General ", which in turn aroused their curiosity on DG.
Products
The first computer had the name Nova and were 16 -bit machines. Due to their high stability, they were to be found many years in military applications, especially in the U.S. Navy on ships.
DG later developed computer Eclipse series, of which there were 1980 and 32- bit variants. Developed by DG Eclipse s/230 was positioned in direct competition to the successful PDP -11 from DEC. The notation " s/230 " was not just by chance similar to those commonly used by the then market leader IBM names such as " System/360 or S/360 ". The mid-1980s, there were also fully integrated office solutions with software for word processing, accounting and operating billing systems for the Eclipse systems against IBM mainframes were not successful, however, and as minicomputers were a little too early in the market.
In 1984, DG with the Data General One one of the first truly portable and requires network-independent MS- DOS computers on the market. Due to its high price and use of advanced, but not then existing standards in the world of DOS appropriate technology (eg, 3.5 -inch floppy disks) became the DG One but the market is of little importance
1989 brought the DG AViiON computer on the market, with Motorola 88000 processors were equipped initially and on which DG's own UNIX derivative DG / UX ran. In order to increase the performance of a number of technically interesting concepts such as SMP and NUMA were used.
1992 with HADA ("High Availablity Disk Array" ) laid the foundations for the CLARiiON series of storage systems that have been brought to market in 1994.
Today, the company no longer exists on its own, it was acquired by EMC in 1999. Main reason for buying was the memory CLARiiON series. The other products have been discontinued.